Wednesday, October 22, 2003

SBlog Challenge

I ended my involvement in the SBlog Challenge by Jim Benson. It was great working with everyone involved! I learned a bunch of stuff like CSS and Seaside in a very short amount of time. It was cool getting almost immediate feedback on how to use Seaside by its creator, Avi Bryant. I made several new squeaky friends as well (Mark and Edgar)! I hope we can work on something together in the future (maybe another squeak challenge). With that said, SBlog was a unique experience. By that, I have never worked in a team where no one had ever met before in person. It was also different in that people worked on the code at different times and there were only a few instances when we coding at the same time. One of the major hurdles that we faced was simply: communication. We sent a lot of emails, but the lower level details of intention and design were missed. We all knew we wanted to write a blog, but each of us looked at the problem differently from different angles. Perfectly normal in my opinion. But, since we were working at different times and communicating via email, the code was pulled in different directions at different times. We dealt with the problems as soon as they arose, but still some things slipped by. Again, nothing out of the ordinary on an ordinary project. I think if we had more time, these would not have been problems going forward. But, we're magnified by the short amount of time (2 weeks). Despite these problems, I'm still amazed at what we accomplished in such a compressed amount of time! The rest of the team is still finishing the code this week. I had to bow out because I'm trying to buy a house this week (my first!) and getting to know my way around the new planet of Nebreska. I wish all of the SBlog team the best...=)